Overview:

HISTORYNOW
21 April – 23 October 2022
National Archaeological Museum of Venice

Marc Quinn’s HISTORYNOW (2020 – present) series is presented for the first time at the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Venezia. Curated by Aindrea Emelife and Francesca Pini, the exhibition surveys our increasing digital interdependence at a vital point in history. In 2020, our online world expanded dramatically, a phenomenon catalysed by growing restrictions on physical contact due to the global spread of the COVID-19 virus. With a click, we were able to witness history as it was written in every corner of the globe. Each post, screenshot, share, and view were synaptic in a new collective consciousness. Our phones became primary vehicles of documentation and dissemination, with the screenshot serving as a new form of documentary-photography, capturing both our inner and outer worlds.

The HISTORYNOW paintings start as screenshots on Quinn’s iPhone. These are then enlarged and pigment-printed on canvas before Quinn overpaints them in oil and acrylic to hide, blur, and highlight aspects of the image and text beneath. Retaining the iPhone’s original proportions but radically upscaled, these uncanny screengrabs communicate the distorted way in which recent years have been experienced by many from home, via screens. This presents a familiar, first-person account of the daily updates and viral stories that we consumed – and which consumed us – during this shared historical moment. The series becomes a journey through our endlessly refreshing digital feeds of visual stimuli and breaking news alerts, taking in many shared historical events from 2020 onwards.

Painted over the last two years, the process behind each artwork became a meditative action for Quinn, with the daily ritual of painting reflecting the continuous rhythm of scrolling through the internet. While the method, materials, and results of Quinn’s process vary vastly, the screenshot remains a constant, evoking both the enduring permanence and timely ephemerality of news and technology in our lives.

The HISTORYNOW paintings mark a new chapter in Quinn’s ten-year History Paintings project, which upends the grand tradition of history painting by using recent images of crucial global moments drawn directly from the media, enlarged, and painted with oil on canvas, or woven in silk and wool. While the press photographs featured in History Paintings take months to reproduce in oil, the use of photo printing in HISTORYNOW evokes the accelerated drafting of history via online news updates and digital communication.

Here, the paintings are in dialogue with the museum’s collection from classical antiquity. The various pairings invite us to reflect on society past-and-present, our ideals, our social mores, and the hopes and fears that define not only the time we live in but ultimately our shared human condition.